Expedited Stroke Imaging with Electromagnetic Polar Sensitivity Encoding

There is a significant demand for fast and accurate electromagnetic (EM) imaging of stroke in emergency situations. This article presents a method for encoding the raw S-parameters from the Cartesian matrix to polar grid coordinates with weighting coefficients based on the receiver antenna spatial sensitivity. The polar sensitivity encoding (PSE) scheme is based on the fact that the receiver sensitivity generally has an encoding effect and, in this case, it is applied during the transformation of S-matrices to polar grid, which is geometrically congruent with the shape of the head. The PSE scheme alleviates the need for highly accurate and intricate forward and inverse EM field solvers and mitigates the introduction of numerical errors in addition to the unavoidable experimental uncertainties. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the PSE method is robust to head shifts up to about 5 mm and accurate in localizing strokes in less than a second.